


contract, expand

by manics_and_me



Category: Tenet (2020)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:41:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26143534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manics_and_me/pseuds/manics_and_me
Summary: It was only days later that the spell broke and he said- there’s a mission for you.He wouldn’t look at him, not at all, when he said it.
Relationships: Neil/The Protagonist (Tenet)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 150





	contract, expand

**Author's Note:**

> I've only seen Tenet once, and definitely don't totally understand the whole thing. This is just some first thoughts.

In his line of work, it didn’t do much good to think about death.

Like so many of the things Neil thought about, thinking about death could lead to the kind of existential headache that one achieved by imagining loops and layers of time threaded back and forth and around and into each other, like so many temporal scarves.

Neil had, at the age of about 19, one night in – winter perhaps?, it was hard to say for sure now, but it had been completely, solidly dark outside his pokey little window certainly – he had, suddenly but very surely, _changed the way he thought about time_ and simply every other thing while he was at it.

That was the kind of thing that happened to you when you were a maths and physics undergraduate at Oxford University with the kind of pallid complexion that only comes from spending more time in front of an equation than in bed. He could remember, so clearly, the feeling of the change – like changing the POV in a video game, or the Escher-like twist of a dream. Revealing what before had been concealed.

That he was already dead.

That, of course, was only a small part of the larger thinking but it did stick in his throat for that moment, alone in a small room in a big university, working too hard, up too late. Here he was, living, breathing, heart beating. But somewhere else, there he was, dying, choking, heart stopping. He had felt, in that moment, the kind of fervid animation that only ever came twinned with the knowledge of the blank absolute of death.

Luckily, perhaps, the shadowy figures that often seemed to be present out of the corner of Neil’s eyes made their move soon after this. Top secret recruitment into the British intelligence services leaves little time for navel gazing about the nature of mortality.

*****

After that life was terribly exciting. He was recruited, and then recruited again, and after a messy business in Japan near a defunct nuclear station, recruited once more. Creamed off the top. Selected by Tenet. By a restrained and rather devastating man, no less. Neil, who had felt for most of his life untethered by anything, flying forward into discovery and thought with other people nothing but foggy blurs that barely registered, thought _well I may as well dedicate myself to this._

He was guarded and evasive. They would have whole conversations Neil felt to be brimming with warmth and communication, only to realise afterwards that what he had gone in wanting to know had fallen totally by the wayside. He knew the other man looked at him a great deal, eyes on his profile as he bent over his work, on his throat when he laughed, a little giddy as their often adrenaline filled work tended to make him. On his arms when they sparred, again and again, until Neil could move with ease through armed opponents. He looked back, and waited, and nothing ever happened.

There were moments when Neil could swear he felt the tension lying thick and coiled between them, and he wanted to grab the other man and say _just look at this from my point of view_. There were lots of other moments when he thought he was imagining it.

It wasn’t too bad. There was quite a lot else to think about anyway, what with the world on the edge of collapse. All the worlds.

*****

Then, something was different. An atmosphere that was new and unwelcome. He had always been courteous, though indirect. Warm, though oblique. Now, he was taciturn to the point of rudeness. Almost snappy, which was a disturbing change to his usual glacial calm. And on one occasion, the memory of which Neil poked and prodded at, searching uselessly for meaning –

_“Something is surely accelerating here. We have the satellite images of them rounding up the gold, but what good does that do them?”_

_Neil runs a hand back through his hair and then cups his jaw, rubbing at his own stubble as he cranes back from the board, taking in their growing evidence. The other man stands beside him; he isn’t looking at the board. But in a rare case, Neil is too caught up in his own thoughts to wonder what that means._

_“Unless-“, and he feels himself, as he sometimes does, pulled towards understanding, “unless it’s not_ for _them…”_

_He turns suddenly, pivots ninety degrees on his heel to face the other man head on, with his mouth wide open and hands held out in a gesture that can only mean ‘Aha!’. The man’s face is impassive, but his eyes are as large and liquid as ever. Neil reaches out; he feels the need to make contact, to shake him maybe, to make him see the enormity of his theory, not to mention his irrepressible cleverness._

_The other man catches Neil’s wrists and the breath knocks right out of him like a punch. He holds onto them, caught awkwardly in the space between them, tight but not painful. Neil’s jaw has gone slack and his brain, for once, is quiet, stultified by the intensity of the moment – an intensity that he does not understand, but lies thick on him anyway. They stay like that for – well, Neil knows better than to try and quantify how long they stay._

_And Neil wishes he could say –_

I saw a flicker of something on his face.

There was a shadow of something in his eyes.

In that moment I knew that he felt something _._

_But he can’t. The other man's face is impassive as always, and remains that way until he lets go, without ceremony, and turns and walks away._

This strange moment aside, the atmosphere persisted. It seemed inconceivable that Neil could walk up to him and say something so quotidian as _is something wrong?_ or _you’ve been acting strangely_ as if they were normal people. But he was considering it. He couldn’t stand the thickness of the air when they spoke to each other now. There was a space between them; it seemed to waver on the edge of contracting and crushing them together or expanding and throwing them apart.

*****

It was only days later that the spell broke and he said _there’s a mission for you._ He wouldn’t look at him, not at all, when he said it.

*****

Outside their turnstile, Neil was double checking his kit with the kind of numb efficiency that comes with practise.

Steady footsteps made their way towards him, and he turned to find the other man leaning against the corridor wall. It was the least relaxed lean Neil had ever seen.

“Here,” he said, and held out a dogeared novel to Neil. “You’ll be waiting out the inversion for a while. Thought you might get bored.”

He still wouldn’t meet his eye, but Neil wanted to seize the most benign interaction they’d had in days.

“Catch 22!” he exclaimed with genuine enthusiasm. “Wonderful! Nothing like some light American literature to really turn off the overworked brain.” He was aiming for funny, playing up his snobbish Brit bit, and he was relieved to see the other man smile, just a bit, at the corners of his mouth.

“So,” Neil began again, unsure of where he was going, when-

“I don’t know if I’ve made the right choice here.”

It was so unlike the other man to make such an admission of doubt that Neil’s heart clenched, and he waited.

“I thought it would be easier… better…” He was gritting this out at the opposite wall, face turned away from Neil. “I thought, as we didn't before…”

Neil waited, his every fibre straining for the other man to finish the thought, but the words seemed to trail off and go cold.

“What didn't we do before?” he asked in desperation, taking an abortive step forward that turned into a stumble as the other man moved with a sudden speed and power that would have knocked him back, if it was not for the hands that fisted his shirt and wrapped around the back of his neck pulling him in for a messy and desperate kiss.

Not one to let surprise get the better of him, Neil responded with emphatic approval, pushing the line of his body against the other man, gripping his shoulders tightly until his hands were white.

But just as Neil was thinking _gosh, finally_ and also _wow_ , the other man pulled away, with as much speed and power as before.

“You need to go- the mission- ” he broke off, and Neil could have almost laughed at the state of angst he seemed to have worked himself into. So he and the other man’s past self hadn’t got it on, so what? That was it for them? That was what he had been tying himself in knots over? Neil wished he could see himself in the other man's eyes, and try for some understanding of the bind he seemed to find himself in.

“Look,” he began, grin sliding all over his face, lips still pleasantly tingling. “We should talk- ”

“You have to go- ”

“I know, I know, but when I get back- ”

But the other man had already turned and was walking away, at unnatural speed. Neil, confused and exasperated, but giddy nonetheless, shouted after him “We will talk about this you know! As soon as I get back!”

*****

Later, and earlier, when Neil turns around to jog back into the cave with a sagacity and calm he only half feels, he thinks _Oh_.

He thinks _You idiot_.

He thinks _We would have had time. We could have had more._

And he thinks _We’ve both been dead the whole time anyway_.

He thinks, like so many things, their relationship has been a matter of perspective. How could he have known it was a tragedy? 


End file.
